Thank you so much for your reply! I have a few questions if I may.
As a military physician, how different is it in practice from your civilian counterparts? Also, what are the chances that you will be deployed?
If you practice in a hospital military medicine is just a normal practice in a really dysfunctional clinic. Twice as much work as a civilian would put up with and the EMR doesn't work. You could, however, be shunted into an operational role (seeing active duty) which is more focused on adolescent medicine and occupational medicine than whatever you trained in, or you could even be sent to a primarily admin role.
Odds of being deployed depend entirely on the political situation. At the height of the Iraq war you would be lucky to only have one 9 month deployment. Now not a single person in my residency class has done an operational tour, let alone deployed. There is no limit to how much they can deploy you once you are in.
Ah, I see! So residencies are really a shot in the dark in terms of hoping that what you want to do lines up with what the military needs that year. Do you happen to know what the average amount of years is for a person to have to go unmatched/GMO tour before matching into the residency they want? Also, how do military residencies differ from civilian residencies in terms of training?
So again the military is being completely reorganized now. I can't really tell you what you'll be up against. When I trained about 60-75% of Navy physicians would do a 2-3 year GMO tour after intern year and most would be allowed to come back to residency. A smaller percentage of AF physicians would do flight surgery and most would not get to come back to military training. The Army did very few GMO tours, but far more first tour residency complete physicians were placed into operational roles. The key thing, though, is that they are reorganizing everything right now and no one can tell you what things will look like when you get there.
The information I got from my recruiter about extending medical school and doing research is different from what you and my friends have told me thus far, so thank you for clarifying that. I was originally looking at the potential of doing space medicine with the air force, but I was told recently that there isn't a lot of medical research in it yet, unlike the work done at NASA and some other medical institutes like Baylor college of medicine. Do you know what the outlooks are for the research in that field?
In general the military outsources their major research efforts to civilians. There are exceptions but they are rare, and its even more rare for that exception t be someone on their initial obligation. Assume that as a first tour AF physician that you will not be doing research on space medicine.
Yeah, this is why I wanted to make sure I read the contract fully. I want to make sure that I fully understand what I am getting into. If you don't mind me asking what was the deciding factor for you going into military medicine and is there anything you feel that you missed out on since you took that route?
I went to the second most expensive medical school in the country, wanted to do primarily clinical practice, went into the lowest paying specialty, and always had extremely romantic notions of the military and a strong desire to join. I still have no idea if it was the right decision. I had a lot of lucky breaks: trained at my top choice, no GMO tour, full scope of practice, good mentorship. Even still the duty station where I did payback was an absolute slog and being out feels just incredible by comparison.
